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Before You Grow

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Before You Grow

#81

Post by nostrademons »

euph0ria wrote: post #76

Everyone says to create a product that is loved (agreed), but how do you get constructive feedback in the early days? I've experienced that many users are unwilling to engage in conversation, they test it and if they don't like it they leave and won't communicate why. Suppose one creates a new Whatsapp-like product, how would one, in practice, go about gathering feedback?

The "unwilling to engage in conversation, if they don't like it they leave and won't communicate why" is your feedback.

Dirty secret that startup methodologies usually doesn't tell you: it's mostly trial and error. You observe people, you form a hypothesis about what they want, you put something in front of them, and you see if they want it. If they don't, change something. It's not unusual to require dozens to hundreds of iterations before you converge on something folks like.

This is also why founders that are building for themselves have such an advantage: then you do get some signal about exactly what you might need to change, and why you would want it. You've got to know (and accept) yourself pretty well to be able to listen to it, though.

Re: Before You Grow

#82

Post by euph0ria »

lincolnq wrote: post #79
euph0ria wrote: post #76

Everyone says to create a product that is loved (agreed), but how do you get constructive feedback in the early days? I've experienced that many users are unwilling to engage in conversation, they test it and if they don't like it they leave and won't communicate why. Suppose one creates a new Whatsapp-like product, how would one, in practice, go about gathering feedback?

If you're standing in front of them with a notebook in hand, it's hard for them to avoid saying something . So that's step one. Step two would be to interpret nothingness as (negative) feedback that your product wasn't interesting enough for them to bother commenting on. Which probably means you're not solving a deep enough problem. This problem is really hard for whatsapp-like products, since people already have the…

On a product I worked on we emailed every user that didn't engage with the product after sign up and requested feedback on how we could improve the service, what is lacking etc.. tried many different phrases but it was about 1 in 500 that replied and gave serious feedback.

Making current users even more happy is one way to go, they are more likely to provide feedback but it skews the perspective since we don't get any feedback on what the unhappy users were unhappy with.

Now, suppose it is a Whatsapp-style product, there must be a way to gather feedback even for them?

Re: Before You Grow

#83

Post by tjholowaychuk »

Another alternative: don't build something huge, don't get funding from VCs, build a comfortable business for yourself instead of a gimmicky trend that will be irrelevant in a few years. I feel like this is really underrated these days, if you spend the time truly earning it, not only is it more rewarding but the company may last more than 3-4 years.

Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefully that will give you time and financial freedom to build more complex products down the road.

Re: Before You Grow

#84

Post by beat »

downandout wrote: post #52

Building something users love is, of course, the challenge. 99% of startups are unable to do this, and some of those that can't still manage to raise money because someone involved went to Stanford or is otherwise well-connected, only to inevitably fail later on. Generally speaking, these days if you don't have rabid fans of your product almost immediately among some group of users - however small - the product as yo…

VCs are optimizing for something other than love. They're optimizing for potential scale. You can build a product that customers love, but with a low ceiling for the market (like, say, building a really awesome surfboard). VCs want to see billion dollar market potential. So they may invest in something without real proof of customer love, or even customer need, just because the market potential is great.

Re: Before You Grow

#86

Post by lrmunoz »

trg2 wrote: post #48
jot wrote: post #11

I recommend using https://www.promoter.io/ to measure NPS. It's a brilliant starting point for getting useful feedback too. I've ended up using it for the conference and coworking community that I run as well as for a software product.

I would love to see a comprehensive list of all of these tools to measure NPS. Does one exist?

Sorry for the shameless plug, but just by coincidence, I have recently started building a simple NPS tool. Currently it's only a landing page, but I'd appreciate anyone interested to subscribe: https://nps.io

I have extensive experience applying the NPS to the hospitality industry, and I can tell you that it's not a marketing gimmick as I have read in some other comments. That's why I decided to roll my own service :-)

Re: Before You Grow

#87

Post by euph0ria »

nostrademons wrote: post #81
euph0ria wrote: post #76

Everyone says to create a product that is loved (agreed), but how do you get constructive feedback in the early days? I've experienced that many users are unwilling to engage in conversation, they test it and if they don't like it they leave and won't communicate why. Suppose one creates a new Whatsapp-like product, how would one, in practice, go about gathering feedback?

The "unwilling to engage in conversation, if they don't like it they leave and won't communicate why" is your feedback. Dirty secret that startup methodologies usually doesn't tell you: it's mostly trial and error. You observe people, you form a hypothesis about what they want, you put something in front of them, and you see if they want it. If they don't, change something. It's not unusual to require dozens to hundr…

Yes, I understand that it is a tacit feedback, but it is so binary that it is hard to infer something from it besides we need to change.

Iteration, it feels like a company could use the run rate iterating and never figure it out?

Re: Before You Grow

#88

Post by coffeemug »

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #83

Another alternative: don't build something huge, don't get funding from VCs, build a comfortable business for yourself instead of a gimmicky trend that will be irrelevant in a few years. I feel like this is really underrated these days, if you spend the time truly earning it, not only is it more rewarding but the company may last more than 3-4 years. Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefu…

> don't get funding from clueless VCs

Usually if people put money down and there is an entire industry around it, the collective mindset of that industry is close to optimal. They might be wrong on a couple of important issues. They also might be very wrong, but they're still close to optimal by definition because nobody's doing it better.

TL;DR: calling entire world-class industries clueless implies naiveté.

Re: Before You Grow

#89

Post by ikeboy »

beat wrote: post #65
danieltillett wrote: post #51

What do you do if you make a B2B product that gives your customers such a big competitive advantage in the market that they won't talk about your product, actively hide that they use it, and refuse to let you tell others that they use it?

Is this an actual case, or an imaginary what-if scenario?

I use a B2B software from a startup and I would hesitate to tell anyone about it that I thought might go into the market. They're adding features based on my input, and I'm seriously considering developing the same software myself or outsourcing it so that it's not publicly available or the public version takes time to catch up to my own. (It's not about the costs.)

Re: Before You Grow

#90

Post by nostrademons »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #5

You’ll have to rely on inorganic means like ads, marketing, or PR to maintain your growth, and this gets very hard to sustain This is a point that I am always curious/skeptical about because growth will always become marginally harder. So ads, marketing and PR are always going to be necessary at some point. Using his examples, facebook is creating airplanes to deliver facebook to people they can't reach otherwise - t…

CAC ~= CPC / conversion rate. If your conversion rate is 1%, then your CAC is 100 * whatever you're paying for a lead. If it's 50%, it's 2 * what you're paying. Many businesses that are uneconomical at 100 * their ad costs are economical at 2 * their ad costs, and even the ones that are economical are much more profitable.

The article is suggesting that you get your conversion & retention rates up into something reasonable before you blast out ad spending. You've got a lot more leverage here than on almost any other driver of your business's economics. It makes no sense to lose money on CAC - LTV and make it up in volume.

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